Financial landscapes of agrarian change in Cambodia

Social Reproduction Theory: State of the field and new directions in geography

“…The term evokes the increasingly blurring edges between life and work in late capitalism, when the responsibility of social reproduction is individualized to the point that "life becomes work" (Winders & Smith, 2018, p. 878 my emphasis). Although sometimes critiqued as a class-specific concept (Smith & Winders, 2015)-as seen during the pandemic, working from home is indeed a class privilege that is also gendered and racialized-life's work also illuminates global workers' growing need to weather precariousness by increasing the time devoted to income generation beyond the living wage and decreasing the time spent in the care of social reproduction (Ebner & Johnson, 2020;Fernandez, 2018;Green, 2020;Katz, 1991;Marks, 2015;Minkoff-Zern, 2014). An attention to spatiality thus simultaneously reveals the shifting geographies of precarious work and forecasts a larger, longer-term crisis of capitalism.…”

“…Unable to repay their microcredit loans, poorer families were driven to sell their lands, switch to cash-crops, or mechanize their production, fueling the transition to capitalist agriculture, increasing the reliance of farming households on remittances and market goods, and clearing the path for alternate and often more predatory forms of credit. Thus, farming households now "juggle a variety of debt obligations in order to meet their basic needs" (Green, 2020), reconfiguring their socially reproductive practices around financial calculation (Adkins & Dever, 2016) as opposed to agricultural production. As households increas-ingly care for debt at the expense of social reproduction (Karaagac, 2020) debt in turn is shaping a new agricultural landscape.…”

“…A political ecology approach similarly underscores the co‐production of agricultural practices and debt among rural households (Li, 2014). As Green’s (2020) analysis of financial landscapes in the transition to a capitalist agriculture in Cambodia reveals, the financialization of social reproduction and land use patterns inform each other deeply. In the village of Bung Chhuk the transition from collective to individual land tenure facilitated households' access to microcredits for agricultural production and everyday needs using their lands as collateral; however, a parallel move away from the traditional labor exchange system in favor of paid labor meant that many households could not hire enough laborers to cultivate their land to its full productivity.…”

Challenging the financial inclusion-decent work nexus: evidence from Cambodia’s over-indebted internal migrants

“…In the late 1990s in Cambodia for example, international donors and agencies supported the launch of several microfinance institutions, aiming to replicate the microcredit model pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in the 1980s. ACLEDA, the first institution to provide credit to small groups of women in rural areas, started its operations as a non-profit NGO in 1991, supported by the ILO amongst others (Green, 2020a). From the early 2000s, experts in the development community strongly advocated for the transformation of microfinance institutions into for-profit commercial enterprises, echoing a broader shift towards neoliberal market-based approaches to development in Cambodia, and beyond (Green, 2020a).…”

“…ACLEDA, the first institution to provide credit to small groups of women in rural areas, started its operations as a non-profit NGO in 1991, supported by the ILO amongst others (Green, 2020a). From the early 2000s, experts in the development community strongly advocated for the transformation of microfinance institutions into for-profit commercial enterprises, echoing a broader shift towards neoliberal market-based approaches to development in Cambodia, and beyond (Green, 2020a).…”